Not Personal, Not Impersonal

Arrive at work at 8:45

Here is a diary entry of mine from the year 2000. One day from august each day this week.

Tuesday – Two Noble Kinsmen

Arrive at work at 8:45. My father for some reason came in on the tube with me. He didn’t have a meeting until late and so decide to leave at the same time as me. This is unfortunate. Lately I have been having a bottle of orange juice and a can of Red Bull each morning on the tube and the lack of it has me visibly shaken, and shaking. My hands are playing up again and I ride the whole way in leaning against the doors with my hands behind my back. Also I am supposed to be reading “About a Boy” I’ve almost gotten to the end of it and it annoys me that I can’t complete it because he’s here. That is until I realise that I probably couldn’t read it anyway because it would involve me holding the book in my hands and the movement would make reading difficult. Of course if he wasn’t here I could have had a Red Bull.

Work is crazy as usual. But nothing particularly difficult. I notice myself slipping somehow. Things that should be easy are harder. Lack of sleep could be the problem, I had 7 hours last night and that should be enough just about. By the end of the afternoon we are tearing our hair out to make something work before a presentation. I go along to the meeting and I start drinking. I realise too late that I haven’t had any lunch or dinner yet, or much water. As I wonder out of the building and down the river I realise that I’m drunk. I can’t work out how it happened. The presentation was at our building down near Embankment which makes for an annoying situation. Two Noble Kinsmen is at the Globe right by my usual building. Unfortunate but not impossible to fix. I wonder across the train bridge, and past the National. There is a woman sitting behind a painting, a Tishen copy (I think), and it is wonderful, and very large. It is the thing that first catches my attention, but not the thing that holds it. The thing is the woman. She has very long hair and as I look at her she picks it all up in her hands and throws it over her right shoulder.

Naturally I was slightly distracted throughout Two Noble Kinsmen. It is a Shakespeare, but it is supposedly co-written with John Fletcher. Fletcher apparently also wrote Henry VIII with Shakespeare. Strangely enough it is the classic story of two people being shackled to each other in prison. (It being Two Noble Kinsmen rather than Henry VIII.) In most film versions of this story it starts with the two hardened cons hating each other and through their adventures they learn to love each other. In this, which I believe to be the original, a slightly different tack is taken. The two are cousins and love each other, they fall for a woman who wonders past their cell window and suddenly they are in love with the same woman. And in the outcome one of them dies. It was a very strange play which was particularly convolutedly plotted. Which seemed very un-shakespearian. The best performance was from someone who looked a lot like Louis Theroux, I couldn’t find a program though so I can’t verify this, but this person was playing one of those small comedy roles near the interval.

But as I sweltered in the heat and could feel the bodies of the people next to me pressing against me. By the end of the play I still hadn’t eaten. The crush for the bar at the globe had meant food was not an option. I think I ordered a cheese sandwich but I got three bottles of water and a glass of red wine. Well no matter I thought, none of it helped. I had been bad and I was being sent home without my supper. Such is the way of things.